Saturday, May 23, 2015

The psychological echo chamber
that Hannibal (and Hannibal) builds
throughout the first season is one that entraps many a character, and drives
Will into a complete breakdown.In a
meta-narrative sense, it also draws in the viewer, with plot points, themes, and
motifs repeating themselves throughout the extended story to create a hypnotic,
ambient buzz of dread (most notably in “Releves”, which I discuss here.)So it’s only appropriate that in a second
season in which the power dynamic between Will and Hannibal is flipped, there
would be an episode like “Sakizuke” that mirrors its counterpart from Season 1.

“Amuse-Bouche” was the second
episode of Hannibal’s maiden voyage,
and it famously dealt with rogue pharmacist Eldon Stammets, who drugged and
planted diabetics in order to give them a more profound connection to the
world, which then extends to the almost fungal connections that form between
the main players of the show.“Sakizuke”
similarly explores the symbiotic connections between these characters, and
their varying states of decay.As I alluded
to in the essay for “Kaiseki”, Bryan Fuller includes some of Hannibal’s
Japanese background in Season 2, primarily in Brian Reitzell’s sound design and
with the episode titles.Sakizuke is
the Japanese culinary version of Amuse-Bouche, so this episode of the same name
also deals with a mad artist assembling humans into a giant performance piece
meant to connect them with a greater purpose.This time, it’s the wheel (or spiral) of bodies that the unnamed killer
crafts inside a secluded grain silo. It’s one of the most memorable grotesqueries
in the show’s run, a Hieronymous Bosch nightmarescape invading the waking
world.

Leave it to Hannibal to offer the
most compelling analysis of this daisy chain of death.As he peers into the top of the grain silo
after discovering the killer’s lair, the bodies form the iris of an eye, while
also reflecting in his eye (in a closeup that tells so much about what lies
deep inside the inky vaccum of Dr. Lecter.)Before arriving at the scene, he asks Jack if the killer is looking at
God, and theorizes that “The eye looks beyond this world and into the
next.And sees a reflection of man
itself.”Later, when he’s stitching the
killer into his own creation, he comforts him by saying “God gave you purpose,
not only to create art, but to become it” (much like classic painters would
insert themselves into their pieces.)It’s easy to read a touch of megalomania into Hannibal’s view, which
also ties in with his love for the classical arts (which often invoke a
profound sense of transcendent divinity.)And in Will’s empathic vision of the body spiral, Hannibal repeats one
of his famous lines from “Amuse-Bouche” (“Killing must feel good to God
too.He does it all the time. And are we
not created in his image?”), furthering the godlike aspirations attached to
him.But a much more brass tacks
motivation can also be applied to his fascination.

For despite his status as the
FBI’s new Will Graham and a seeming victory in his grand experiment of Season
1, Hannibal is losing much of what really stabilizes him.His hyper-compartmentalized psyche needs Will
to take the blame for the Shrike copycat murders, but it also yearns to save
what he perceives as his only real friend in the world.His loneliness at the end of “Kaiseki” is
reflected here in his several meetings with Will, and even though he’s now
tight with the FBI, he’s still an outsider (seen in a nice bit of business when
he awkwardly pivots between Katz, Zeller, and Price, one of the few examples
the series has offered of this graceful man almost tripping over himself.)

And after a period of slowly
percolating distrust, Bedelia finally fires Hannibal as a patient, in a scene
filled with animal menace and a raw, palpable sense of fear.Gillian Anderson’s dry, off-kilter portrayal
of Bedelia has always matched up well with Mads Mikkelsen’s subdued,
hyper-controlled performance.Just as
his motivations are often fascinatingly hard to read, so too does her poker
face conceal what seem to be much more complex emotions than she readily
allows.Despite his Machiavellian view
of the world (nicely echoed in his comments to Jack, that the killer knows that
“those in the world around him are a means to an end”), there’s always an
eternally childlike vulnerability to him.Aside from his attempts at connecting with Will, this can be seen in his
continuing offers of friendship to Bedelia.So when she throws down her final rejection, he’s left without his main
ties to human normality.And his first
instinct is to balance things out by turning her into his next meal (in his
office and in his later failed attempt at her house.)It’s telling that when Jack intones that “The
killer’s having an existential crisis”, his words are crosscut with Hannibal
dining on veal taken from the body spiral killer’s leg, a resetting of his
control over the world after the abject rejection he experiences in the first
half of the episode.

But in Bryan Fuller’s grand
scheme, Hannibal’s view of the body spiral as a connection to the divine might
have more resonance than is readily apparent.Acclaimed mythology scholar Lillian Tyack (also a major Hannibal fanatic, a longtime reader of
this blog, and the author of the forthcoming book Echo/Ecco: Theological Mythocryptography in a Post-Navidson World) recently
contacted me from her Swiss chalet with the following sage insights:

These past two episodes have featured, albeit briefly, scenes involving pomegranates. The first occurs when Will imagines himself having dinner with the Wendigo and the other is showcased when Hannibal feasts alone on the leg of the man he added to the mural. The image of a pomegranate has existed throughout history as a reminder of the Rape of Persephone, the goddess of Greek mythology who represents the fertility of vegetation. She exists as the daughter of the goddess of the harvest, Demeter and the god of thunder, Zeus. Persephone is best known for her role as the Queen of the Underworld alongside her husband Hades. She was brought there as a girl when Hades and Zeus transpired her kidnapping. This caused Demeter great grief and once she realized that the father of her child betrayed her, she vowed to inhibit the growth of all agriculture until Persephone was returned. Hades conceded to let his wife go, but before her release he tricked her into eating the seeds of a pomegranate, thus forever tying her to the Underworld and forcing her to return for one third of every year.

In Hannibal, the Underworld isn’t so much a tangible place as it is a state of mind. This Underworld is represented by the darkness of the psyche, how far someone can go until they finally tumble into the psychotic, horrific and distinctly evil. Hannibal Lecter rules this mindset; he is a cannibalistic psychopath yet he is able to float through the world with charming ease. Will, on the other hand, is pulled into this horrific darkness by the two men he trusts the most. Hannibal, like Hades, believes that brining Will into his own domain is the best for both of them while Jack, like Zeus, pushes Will to madness for his own benefit. Alana serves as the role of Demeter, who is much distraught by what became of a man who was once so close to her. Jack and Alana have both served as semi-parental figures to Will throughout the first season, but it is not till this episode where the audience is able to see how much he relies and clings to them. When Alana determines that Jack is partially to blame for Will’s predicament, she prevents the FBI from flourishing by calling an inside investigation and even serves as a possible threat to the livelihood of the establishment. She persists in her efforts to retrieve Will from the Underworld, and slowly but surely he makes his way back. He sometimes experiences moments of clarity, and even his act of making himself seem in need of Hannibal’s attention as a means of manipulation serves as evidence that he is becoming more lucid as each day passes. Even when Will breaks out of the physical and metaphorical prison that he is trapped in, he is still intrinsically tied to Hannibal Lecter. This respite then ends and as the season progresses, Will gradually re-enters his Underworld to rule alongside Hannibal as he aids him in creating unconventional works of human art. Then, he serves as the cannibal’s other half, gaining his trust and establishing himself as a member of the psychotic. During the killer/veal dinner scene, as Hannibal sits across from an empty seat with only a pomegranate as a placeholder, it is evident that he awaits Will’s return as the Queen of his own personal Underworld.

The
cursed nature that Will might carry extends into the flights of altered
perception that he experiences throughout this season.Hugh Dancy walks such a fine line with his
acting, as much like Hannibal in Season 1, he’s required to play a character
who’s often playing a character.Or
two.Or three.His breakdown in front of Alana and Hannibal
at the open of this episode is revealed to be an elaborate emotional con when
he returns to his basement cell.When he
pleads with Beverly for help (in a mirror of Anthony Hopkins’s quid pro quo
speech in Silence of the Lambs), he
seems sincere.But in the episodes to
come, his descent back into Lecter’s psychological dungeon calls much of that
sincerity into question.It’s a
disorienting ride for the character and the audience, yet another symbiotic
connection fraught with peril.

Leftovers ahoy:

*Now that he’s incarcerated, the
tenor of Will’s empathic visions has changed.Instead of the classic image of the gold pendulum erasing the crime scene
and placing him into a fugue state, he’s now instantly transported into the
photographs that he examines.At the
same time, we get our first glimpse of Hannibal’s version of Will’s visions,
his highly attuned sense of smell placing him firmly within the golden
cornfield that will lead him to the body spiral.

*And speaking of visions, the
extensive eyeball motif in this episode can also be interpreted as yet another
callback to Garret Hobbs’s “See!See!”
(itself another echo of similar lines by Francis Dolarhyde.)

*In another echo of
“Amuse-Bouche”, we see Jack pouring out his guilt over Will to his psychiatrist
(played by the great Martin Donovan), just as Will began to pour out his guilt
over killing Garret Jacob Hobbs to Hannibal in that earlier episode.The irony of Jack’s feelings is that he later
essentially gives implicit consent for Beverly to continue picking Will’s brain
for help, thus once again inadvertently dooming a subordinate of his to
Hannibal’s murderous advances.

*Bedelia’s visit to Will at
episode’s end (and her confirmation that she believes him) will prove to be the
thread of sanity that Will clings to the most as he formulates his plan against
Hannibal.But it also becomes a much
more complicated matter in view of her eventual siding with her former patient.

*I failed to mention it in the
“Kaiseki” essay, but I love the cage that Will sits in at Baltimore State
during his interviews.That line of
individual pens is such a striking image, fully in keeping with the show’s
Gothic sensibilities while also emphasizing the medieval cruelty of Frederick
Chilton’s house of horrors.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

If Season 1 of Hannibal traced its overall narrative
arc in the pattern of Will Graham’s gradual mental collapse (and Hannibal’s
gradual enveloping of his mind and the lives of the other characters), then
Season 2 is where Bryan Fuller fully commits to plumbing the phantasmagoric
depths of the darkness into which everyone has descended.As I mentioned in my introductory essay to
this series, what began in 2013 as a psychological thriller/police procedural
with heavy shades of the grotesque seems over time to have taken on the
properties of Hannibal Lecter, almost as if he’s been a virus infecting all
aspects of the story.Characters who
originally have strong bearings on the world begin to lose their grip, or to fall
into a haze of mild confusion.Plot
chronologies become fractured, with jump cuts in time eliminating key moments
in several lives.And James Hawkinson’s
cinematography and Brian Reitzell’s sound design, always lush to begin with,
become nightmarishly, surreally decadent and unnerving.As Will says to Jack in this episode “You
have let the fox into the henhouse.”And
just as Hannibal has wormed his way into the good graces of the FBI, so too has
his character and his show also done so to us.

The key development in Hannibal’s
takeover is Will’s near total cognizance of his role in framing him for the
Minnesota Shrike copycat murders.Watching
the show during these two first seasons has always been an interesting exercise
in mixing prognostication with pragmatism.We all know that Will must eventually emerge from his exile in the Baltimore
State Psychiatric Hospital’s maximum security wing/torture dungeon in order to
catch Hannibal and go on to tangle with Francis Dolarhyde and the manifestation
of the Red Dragon.Fuller has been
explicit about his long term plans to retell the classic beats of the
Lecterverse over multiple seasons.But Hannibal’s ratings have also been
sketchy enough so far that any faith in the actual progression of that plan is
always up in the air in the viewer’s mind (although the show’s foreign
financing has given it much leeway in its content and general survival.)

Which is what lends so much of
this season its demonic power and allure.We know that Will is searching for the answers that will free him and
finally condemn Hannibal.But we also
know that even at its best, his mind can be a funhouse of mirrors on the verge
of cracking.So the possibility that low
ratings or a sudden creative shift might lead to major changes in the narrative
seems to always be a very plausible prospect.Will’s method of easing his psyche while incarcerated (by escaping into
visions of him fly fishing) is a beautiful counterpoint to the stark ugliness
of his cell.But even in that pastoral
beauty, he can't escape the Wendigo, whose emergence from the stream
immediately before the opening credits offers a stunning image that foreshadows
the epic battle of wills that comes to dominate this season.But the question of who’s fighting who and
what for will become much hazier before the apocalyptic events of the finale.

And speaking of the finale…there
are the powerful opening moments of “Kaiseki”, which in time will be revealed
as the beginning of the bloodbath awaiting at season’s end.Teasing the climactic scene at the beginning
of a narrative has become somewhat of an overused trope in modern television
and film, but it works like gangbusters here.For one, it upends the expectations set up by the first season, in which
Hannibal’s icy, controlled demeanor helps to shape the slow burn tension of the
plot. Seeing Mads Mikkelsen gracefully vault
over his kitchen counter to engage in a brutal melee with Laurence Fishburne
runs completely counter to the general restraint we’ve seen him display so far
(one or two murders aside).It also
firmly ties him to the animalistic vision he holds in Will’s eyes, while also
establishing a fascination with how these two men eventually end up literally
at each other’s throats.

The cinematic language used to
paint this enigmatic portrait is direct, yet still complex.The opening shot of Hannibal slicing into a
prime slab of red meat from the left side of the frame is mirrored after the
Twelve Weeks Earlier title card with a similar shot of him slicing a pale cut
of fish from the right side, evoking the relative placidity that will
eventually build towards matters most bloody.Hannibal and Jack are both framed in tight, wide angle close ups, their
faces framed slightly off kilter in almost Leone-esque fashion (appropriate for
their preparation for a duel.)Reitzell’s
koto drum-inflected music establishes the Japanese motifs that will be featured
this season (in a nod to Hannibal’s Aunt Muraski from Hannibal Rising, mentioned here at the dinner table), while also
lending the two men’s brawl an air of the martial arts.This koto drumbeat will also be repeated in
military form when Hannibal visits the river crime scene in Rockville, MD, a
steady rhythmBoth men’s faces are
reflected in Hannibal’s knife, violence now the connecting force for their
relationship (and possibly a mini-reference to the samurai sword.)

The clear fissure in time of this
scene, and all of its attendant complications and implications, is also a
fitting reflection of how time and perception in general will be distorted
throughout this season.Embarking on his
quest for the truth, Will is a man unstuck in time, his ability to reconstruct the
past only at its most effective when used for others’ lives.The journey down his personal rabbit hole
constantly threatens to warp his view of the world even further.When Alana puts him in a hypnotic state to
job his memory (using a metronome that mimics the pendulum he sees in his hyper-empathic
fugue states), the darkly gorgeous image of her as an inky siren, enveloping Will
with her kiss is but the first of many flirtations with the abyss that he’ll
have.In the midst of his long game of
hunting Hannibal, there are so many moments where it’s unclear if he’s in
character or completely succumbing to the doctor’s seductive charms (the hazy
memory of Hannibal implanting Abigail’s ear into Will’s stomach via feeding
tube takes on an almost rape-like connotation here, while also reinforcing some
of the homoerotic tension that exists between these two men.)And the audience is drawn right in too,
images both fantastical and nightmarish threatening to obliterate any trace of
the fairly linear story of the first season.

When he confronts Hannibal in the
depths of the hospital, Will tells him “I’m going to remember Dr. Lecter.And when I do, there will be a reckoning.”His words ring true on the personal front,
but his long path toward the truth will also prove to create a reckoning for
all of the characters in Hannibal’s thrall, and a powerful reckoning for the
show as a whole.

Bring on the leftovers:

*Leave it to Beverly Katz, the
eternally pragmatic voice of reason, to be the one who’s able to calmly examine
the case against Will, enlisting his help in analyzing the gaggle of missing
persons who will turn out to be the Boschian wheel of bodies.Too bad that her pragmatism will lead to her
demise at Hannibal’s hands.

*I sometimes feel like I give
Bedelia short shrift in these essays, although her presence so far has been
somewhat fleeting and in service of moving the plot along.But as this episode shows, her understanding
of Hannibal’s threat continues to grow, especially as he pushes her to lie to
Jack about him. I do love when he tells her "I'm being as open and honest as I know how", which is a perfectly true and Lecterian thing to say.

*”The irony is that he is my
patient, but he refuses to speak to me.Makes
me feel like I'm fumbling with his head like a freshman pulling at a panty
girdle.” (Chilton, speaking to Hannibal about Will.It’s a direct echo of Lecter’s description of
Chilton to Will in Red Dragon.)

*The dynamic between Jack and
Alana is realistically complex and satisfying, as she reports him to the FBI
(and Cynthia Nixon’s Kade Prurnell) for lack of judgment (or is it misconduct)
in his handling of Will, even as the two of them maintain their joint familial
protection of Will’s legacy (symbolized here in his dog Winston, who keeps
running back to Chez Graham while under her care.)That dynamic will get even more complicated
this season, especially when Alana falls under Hannibal’s spell.